It is said that we don’t need a minimum wage, that a minimum wage causes unemployment, that if the minimum wage were lower – or completely eliminated – then employers could afford to hire more workers. It is said often that this is “supply and demand” and an ironclad “law of economics.” It is of course an argument designed to appeal to the simpler minded half of the gene pool.

Yet two facts confront us.

One, the real purchasing power in constant dollar terms of the minimum wage has declined for 45 years, so there has been a de facto “lowering” of the minimum wage, and Two, we currently have a very persistent and high level of unemployment.

The laboratory of life has proved this favorite Chamber of Commerce meme to be a fabrication that is nowhere near real life economics.

We conclude that the theory that lowering the minimum wage increases employment is FALSE.

The Fair Wage folks urge you to get involved in passing the Eureka Fair Wage Act, also known as the Minimum Wage Ordinance. If passed through a popular vote, the Act would require large employers with 25 or more workers in Eureka to pay a $12 dollar minimum wage. A higher minimum wage, with a small business exception, will improve lives, make Walmart reconsider its presence in Eureka, boost the local economy, bring employment up, and allow individuals who work full time to rise just above the federal poverty level.

Meetings for the Eureka Fair Wage Act are now every Wednesday at 6:15pm at the Eureka Labor Temple, 840 E Street. More information can be found and questions answered by visiting the Eureka Fair Wage Act website, fairwages.org, or by calling 707-442-7465. If you are interested in helping the campaign in any way, wherever you live, please get in contact.

The Eureka Fair Wage campaign is delighted that we easily surpassed the 10% signature threshold, guaranteeing ballot access for the Eureka Fair Wage Act. We believe, however, and hope to prove, that we gathered enough signatures to cross the 15% threshold which would put the Fair Wage Act on a ballot even sooner.

Please come out to the Eureka City Council meeting at 6:00pm, Tuesday March 19 and show your support for the Eureka Fair Wage Act. The Fair Wage Act (or “Minimum Wage Ordinance”) will be on the agenda. The City Council has the option, again, to listen to the needs of the people and simply pass the Act, raising the minimum wage for large employers to pay their workers in Eureka. If the Council does not, we will continue organizing and pass the initiative at the ballot box!

Wage Hike Proposal Headed to Eureka City Council

North Coast Journal, Ryan Burns, Mar. 8, 2013

Here’s a ray of hope for people working at Eureka’s Taco Bell. Or Wal-Mart. Or any other business in the city that pays workers as little as the law will tolerate:

A petition to boost Eureka’s minimum wage to $12 an hour has received enough valid signatures to be presented to the City Council at its March 19 meeting.

“In the wealthiest nation on Earth,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union speech, “no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.” Right! Not only does his call to raise America’s minimum wage put some real pop in populism, but it could finally start putting some ethics back in our country’s much-celebrated, (but rarely-honored) “work ethic.” Kudos to Obama for putting good economics and good morals together – and for putting this long overdue increase on the front burner.

But then came the number: $9 an hour. Excuse me, Mr. President, but that means a person who “works full-time” would nonetheless “have to live in poverty.” Yes, nine bucks is a buck-seventy-five better than the current pay, but it’s still a poverty wage, and it doesn’t even elevate the buying power of our wage floor back to where it was in 1968.

Concerned about the fact that Eureka’s workers’ median income level is only 51% of the statewide average, Clark and Atkins feel that raising the minimum wage is a necessary first step, as part of a comprehensive effort to get Eureka’s economy back on track.

The article also featured the reaction of Linda and George’s opponents in their race for Eureka City Council: Polly Endert and Frank Jäger respectively. “It’s totally the wrong approach,” according to Polly Endert and Frank Jäger added, “It’s a great idea, but it’s a job killer.” The evidence shows minimum wage initiatives are neither “totally wrong” nor “job killers.” They are, however, often resisted by entrenched moneyed interests whose influence in this campaign once again threatens the future of Eureka’s working families. When it comes to raising the minimum wage, Linda Atkins and George Clark feel the facts should speak for themselves.

Over the past 12 years around 140 States and Municipalities have enacted living wage measures and 29 states and the District of Columbia all operate with minimum wages above the Federal standard. There is now a rich body of evidence in this area, none of which supports Jäger or Endert’s claims. In 1995 and in a subsequent study in 2000, David Card and Alan Krueger, “consistently found that changes in the minimum wage have not tended to raise unemployment by any discernible amount (and indeed have tended to be associated with slight increases in low-wage employment.”

In 1998 a survey of professional economists at forty leading research universities in the field of labor and public economics published by Victor Fuchs of Stanford and Alan Krueger and James Poterba of MIT conclude that, “the general professional view is, again, that there were no strong negative employment effects, if any, from raising the minimum wage by relatively modest amounts.”

Three more recent studies examining the impact of living wage laws in San Francisco and Los Angeles done in 2005 all agree: “None of these studies finds evidence of significant reductions associated with the implementation of living wages laws.”

A particularly interesting study was done from 2001 to 2005 comparing employment growth between 11 states that operated with minimum wage levels higher than the Federal standard and 33 others that did not. The states operating with the higher minimum wage experienced overall job growth of 0.57 %, while those that maintained the lower Federal minimum wage had a 0.52% growth rate. In other words employment growth was actually slightly faster in those states which paid minimum wages greater than the Federal level.

Given the enormous amount of evidence that contradicts Frank and Polly’s “sky is falling” reaction to the idea of raising the minimum wage for Eureka’s working families, are we to conclude that they simply don’t get it or is this what having “no agenda” means to them?

George Clark and Linda Atkins believe in building our economy from the ground up. Raising wages in Eureka, which are so far below the state average, is the right and fair thing to do for Eureka’s working families. When the spending power of working families goes up, so does morale, which leads to productivity boosts, lowers job turnover, all in an ongoing “virtuous cycle,” and everyone benefits. Furthermore, increased spending by Eureka’s workers creates more demand for products, helping businesses while creating more jobs in the process.”
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